(Newser)
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Thanks to French President Francois Hollande, Jacqueline Sauvage will be leaving a French prison in April after serving three and a half years of a 10-year sentence for killing her husband, the Guardian reports. Sauvage—who said Norbert Marot, her husband of 47 years, was an alcoholic who raped and beat her and her three daughters and abused her son—shot Marot in the back with a rifle the day after her son hanged himself in September 2012. But Hollande, recognizing the circumstances behind the killing, made the rare move of waiving the remainder of Sauvage's five-year minimum sentence so she could apply for release in April (meaning, as the Independent notes, it's not technically a full pardon). "In the face of an exceptional human situation, the president wanted to make it possible for … Sauvage to return to her family as soon as possible," Hollande's office said in a statement.

Although what Sauvage did may have been defensible after so many years of abuse, French law presents a trickier situation: An act such as Marot's killing can only be labeled self-defense if it's a direct response to, and proportional to, the original act of aggression. Sauvage was sentenced to 10 years in prison in October 2014, and that judgment was upheld on appeal this past December, with the state prosecutor arguing that her firing three shots into Marot's back was inadmissible, the BBC notes. But the public rallied to her defense, with more than 400,000 people asking Hollande to get involved, and he did—just two days after meeting with Sauvage's three grown daughters—despite what the BBC labels his "qualms" at using the presidential pardon (he's only used it once before). "I'm overwhelmed, happy, grateful, relieved," the founder of an advocacy group for Sauvage tells the Guardian. (A Florida judge had no such sympathy for a battered woman in her courtroom.)

Hollande got his name in the news for something good. Its the outlier in his case.

JFEB

Feb 1, 2016 8:05 PM CST

Good work President Hollande. Women who kill their continuously abusive husbands/boyfriends/lovers should be thought of as unfortunate heroines.

brawne

Feb 1, 2016 4:47 PM CST

Terrible. It's hard to accept but most abusive relationships require two people. Abuse and trauma change the very synapses in your brain and litte by little what would have been intolerable becomes tolerable. Stocholm Syndrome was named for the hostages in a bank robbery who under the constant threat of violence and death began to bond to their captors in order to survive. Years later when the men were released from jail--two of the women hostages married them on the same day with many of the former hostages as guests. Mercy is kindly foreberance shown to an offender. That's all she got--some mercy. I doubt she'll ever be able to allow herself that in regards to her son's death.